Install Radiant on Ubuntu 14.04

Radiant CMS is one of the most popular open source content management systems build with Ruby on Rails. In this blog article we will show you how to install a basic installation of Radiant CMS on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS with RVM, Ruby and Rubigems. This guide should work on other Debian based Linux VPS systems as well but was tested and written for an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS.

Radiant CMS comes with many features such as:

• Modern user interface
• The ability to arrange pages in a hierarchy
• Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language
• A simple user management system
• Support for Markdown and Textile as well as traditional HTML
• A caching system
• An advanced plugin system
  And much more…

Log in to your Ubuntu server as user root

ssh root@IP_Address

Before proceeding any further, start a screen session by executing the following command:

screen -U -S radiant

It is very important all packages installed on your server to be up to date, so update your system:

apt-get update &&  apt-get -y upgrade

Install the curl package. We will need it for installing Ruby Version Manager (RVM):

apt-get install -y curl

Now install RVM by executing the following command:

bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)

And install all dependencies needed by RVM:

apt-get install -y build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev \
git zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 \
libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion

Once it is installed, setup RVM:

echo [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

Next, we will install Ruby and Rubygems using the Ruby version manager:

rvm install 1.9.3

Check if Ruby is successfully installed:

ruby --version

For Rubygems use the following command:

gem --version

Setup an isolated environment for your project:

rvm use --create 1.9.3@yourproject

Replace ‘yourproject’ with the actual name of your project.

Install some optional clipped dependencies necessary for running Radiant

apt-get install -y ghostscript imagemagick ffmpeg

Execute the following command to install Radiant:

gem install radiant --pre --no-ri --no-rdoc

Once the Radian gem is installed on your Ubuntu server, create a new Radiant project:

radiant ~/yourproject
cd ~/yourproject
echo 'gem "therubyracer", "~> 0.9"' >> Gemfile
bundle install

SQLite database will be used by default. Radiant supports almost all popular databases such as MySQL. PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc..

Initialize the database

bundle exec rake db:bootstrap

Finally, start your new Radiant application:

bundle exec script/server

You can access Radiant’s administrative interface at http://yourIPaddress/admin

With this step the installation of Radiant CMS on your Ubuntu 14.04 VPS is completed. Fore more information about how to use, configure and manage your Radiant CMS installation, please check their official documentation.

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install Radiant CMS for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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